Indian-origin Rohit Prasad to depart Amazon; Andy Jassy reveals Pete DeSantis to lead new AI division

Amazon on Wednesday announced a reorganisation of its artificial intelligence (AI) team, putting a top leader from its cloud division in charge of a new unit.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made the announcement in a message to employees, which was also posted on the company's corporate blog. Peter DeSantis will be leading the new group, Jassy said to his employees.

“I believe we are at this inflection point with several of our new technologies that will power a significant amount of our future customer experiences,” he said.

The announcement comes weeks after the company hosted the after the Amazon Web Services annual cloud computing conference in Las Vegas, which focuses on AI tools and services.

The new Amazon organisation is a combination of the company's Artificial General Intelligence team, its chipmaking unit and quantum computing research.

The AGI team oversees the company’s Nova-branded AI models and the digital brains of the Alexa voice assistant.

“I’ve asked Peter DeSantis to lead a new organization that drives our most expansive AI models (e.g. Nova—and the team we’ve called “AGI”), silicon development (e.g. Graviton, Trainium, Nitro), and quantum computing,” Jassy said.

Rohit Prasad, who helped build the Alexa voice assistant and led its AI efforts recently, will step down at year's end.

Why is Amazon shaking up its AI teams?

The primary motive for Amazon to announce the new leadership changes comes amid its desire to shakeup its reputation that has not been doing well in comparison to rivals like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, who are having breakthroughs with their AI models.

Amazon has invested roughly $8 billion in AI startup Anthropic, and has been using its technology into several of its internal and consumer products. Apart from this, the company is also mulling a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, according to recent reports.

Who is Peter DeSantis?

Peter DeSantis, the leader of Amazon's new AI unit, has been in the company for around 27 years.

“I cannot think of a better leader for this organization than Peter. Peter has been at Amazon for over 27 years, and led some of the most transformative technologies in computing history,” CEO Andy Jassy said announcing his promotion.

Peter DeSantis previously used to be the senior vice president of utility computing and oversaw most AWS engineering teams.

In his new role, DeSantis will report to Jassy, who said that he had a “solving problems at the edge of what’s technically possible.”

Peter was the leader of Amazon EC2 which was launched in 2006, and built the team over many years.

AWS services like Block Storage, File Storage, Load Balancing, Networking, and Monitoring were also launched under his leadership.